The maker of jolly expensive printer ink HP has been on the blower to us about Oracle's claims that both it and Intel know of a plan to kill off the Itanium chip.

Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking HP told Fudzilla that it will continue the development and innovation of Itanium-based Integrity server platforms with its HP-UX operating system using a roadmap that extends more than 10 years. He added that HP will continue to support customers running existing versions of Oracle software on Itanium-based Integrity servers, both existing and future platforms, during the same timeframe.

Donatelli hit out at Oracle's anti-Itanium antics saying that the outfit was showing a pattern of anti-customer behaviour of late as it tries to sort out its failing Sun server business. “HP believes in fair and honest competition. Competition is good for customers, innovation and the marketplace. We are shocked that Oracle would put enterprises and governments at risk while costing them hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity in a shameless gambit to limit fair competition,” he said.

HP pointed out that it had moved ahead into second position in the Unix market while Sun lost share and fell back into third since Oracle announced it would acquire Sun in April of 2009.

Motorola looks like it is going to kill off its first model of the Xoom in June. According to Apple Insider, it seems that the outfit is going to rush out a new successor to meet the Apple iPad 2.

Numbers of people ordering the Xoom are expected to fall from the second quarter. These are expected to be 300,000 units in April, down from between 400,000 and 500,000 in March. And shipments will go below 300,000 in May, the report said.

Motorola is understood to be a little uncertain about the way iPad PCs are going and wants to launch new Xoom model in the second half after evaluating the situation, AppleInsider claims. Xoom was hyped with a Super Bowl advertisement before the 3G-radio-equipped version of the touchscreen tablet hit the shops in February. It is expected to sell between 3 million and 5 million in 2011.

While this is well behind the market leader, Apple, it is not too bad as a product. Unfortunately it was not different enough from Jobs' Mob's gear for it to be a real iPad killer. One day manufactures will realise that the way to kill off the iPad is to make the same thing and ship it out with a lower margin.

However, Motorola has been on the blower and said that the AppleInsider is not accurate and that Motorola Mobility will continue to sell and produce the Motorola Xoom beyond the second quarter.

It will likely not come as much of a surprise to some that Microsoft is rumored to be poised to discontinue its Zune music players at some point this year. While the Zune has gone through multiple evolutions, including the latest Zune HD which received a number of positive reviews, it just has not sold as Microsoft had hoped. As with others in this space, they were basically crushed by Apple with the iPod family of devices.

While the Zune players will likely be discontinued, the Zune will live on in the form of the Zune ecosystem that has been developed and is prominently in use on the Windows Phone 7 platform. The focus will be to continue to develop the Zune software.

It has been rumored for some time that Microsoft might use the Zune technology and re-work it into a portable gaming device. This, too, looks to be something that Microsoft has decided against. Instead, it will focus on being a platform provider in this space with Windows Phone 7, which offers the Xbox and Zune integration that does seem to put it ahead of other offerings.

Microsoft has not refreshed the Zune player offerings since September 2009, and the price of the players as well as the features are showing their age when compared to the latest iPod offerings from Apple. There apparently is no timetable yet on when Microsoft will move forward on this, but a Zune HD at a good price might worth owning if you are a Zune fan who does not have one yet.